Volume II - The Northern Cape Provincial Spatial Development ...

Northern Cape PSDF
Volume 2
D.5 RECOMMENDATIONS
Office of the Premier &
Department of Rural Development & Land Reform
73
December 2011
The settlement study report (Van der Merwe and Zietsman, 2011) suggested various opportunities
for intervention with specific reference to the following:
a) The Provincial Government should align its future urban investment strategy with the
investment typology summarised in Chapter D.2.4. However, municipalities are to be urged
to implement such a scheme with appropriate caution not to jeopardize the unique
context of specific places. This report merely presents the empirical profiles as a point of
departure for further deliberation between the affected parties.
b) Municipalities should use the town profiles presented in Chapter D.3 as a guideline for
gauging future development initiatives on a local scale in their respective urban centres. In
this process individual towns and municipalities may need further investigation and
interpretation to unpack the profiles in greater detail to expose specific local situations.
c) The PSDF, read together with the report should be used to inform possible investors,
entrepreneurs and developers, of the most appropriate locations and economic
components that will best serve development and community needs in the province.
d) A similar settlement study should be repeated after five years in order to monitor changes
to the factual situation over time. Municipalities and other relevant role players should
understand that the findings of this report are not necessarily cast in stone, but that new
information could yield different results in certain cases.
e) The quantitative town profiling in this study should be supplemented and integrated with a
thorough qualitative self‐evaluation from the local role‐players. This exercise should
highlight the various centres’ strong points for future economic and social development.
The process could be used by local decision‐makers to rethink the role their towns play
within a municipal, regional, provincial and national context. In this process the site visits
and personal interviews at each municipality will enhance the identification of the ‘sense of
place’ in each town.
f) Each municipality would benefit from a detailed analysis of their unique town profiles
displayed in a general way in this report. In this way, role players can find out what they
can do to improve the economic status of their towns. Such detailed analysis has to be
undertaken as part of the preparation of the SDF of a municipality.
Dennis Moss Partnership